"
The speaker's voice ceased and in the silence the others turned to look
at the black shape of the island riding the gleaming waters like a
funeral barge. In its dark isolation, cut off from the land by the
quiet current, it seemed a fitting theater for the grim tragedy. They
gazed at it, chilled into dumbness, thinking of the murderer moving to
freedom under the protection of his lie, then overtaken, and in his
anguish, alone in the silence, meeting the question of his conscience.
Once more the words came back to David: "Behold, He that keepeth Israel
shall neither slumber nor sleep."
Susan pressed against her father, awed and cold, and from old Joe,
stretched in his blanket, came a deep and peaceful snore.
CHAPTER III
Susan was riding alone on the top of the bluffs. The evening before,
three men returning from the Oregon country to the States, had
bivouacked with them and told them that the New York Company was a
day's march ahead, so she had gone to the highlands to reconnoiter.
Just here the bluffs swept inward toward the river, contracting the
bottom to a valley only a few miles in width.
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